Open Source Highly Available Storage Solutions?

Gunfighter asks: "I run a small data center for one of my customers, but they're constantly filling up different hard drives on different servers and then shuffling the data back and forth. At their current level of business, they can't afford to invest in a Storage Area Network of any sort, so they want to spread the load of their data storage needs across their existing servers, like Google does. The only software packages I've found that do this seamlessly are Lustre and NFS. The problem with Lustre is that it has a single metadata server unless you configure fail-over, and NFS isn't redundant at all and can be a nightmare to manage. The only thing I've found that even comes close is Starfish. While it looks promising, I'm wondering if anyone else has found a reliable solution that is as easy to set up and manage? Eventually, they would like to be able to scale from their current storage usage levels (~2TB) to several hundred terabytes once the operation goes into full production."

Re:Entry level SAN?

[msporny]

network, app servers, etc aren't highly available, you have a whole new range of equipment and services that needs an HA solution as well

I couldn't agree with you more. I focused on the storage aspect because the article, thread, and Starfish is about HA storage.

I worked at a place where a $400 million project that spent tons of money on high availability database and server components was crippled by bad switches and application servers.

I'm sorry to hear that. What an embarrassingly colossal waste of money. I'm assuming that was US tax payer dollars at work?